Boards

Methodologically the British Community Studies approach never had anything useful to offer to sociology. Arguably its bottom-up inductivism created the very shifting sands into which, with a little nudge from ethnomethodology and so-called feminist methodology, the Queen of the Sciences was to descend into post-modern irrelevance at the end of the last century. If there are no clear and logically formulated theories and no precise, testable hypotheses then a particular study , or a whole mode of ‘analysis’ is no more than another opinion whose power to convince rests only on either the authority of the author(s) or the financial clout of the publisher.
However Wilmott and Young’s landmark FAMILY AND KINSHIP had the tremendous saving grace of a genuinely engaged, respectful and open-minded approach to the ordinary East-enders who made it possible. It also provided a salutory bulwark against the ignorance of the planners.

Michael Young had the foresight to initiate the follow-up study in which the lives of the Bethnal Green dwellers who had been moved out to Greenleigh, Redbridge etc were examined: BETHNAL GREEN TO GREENLEIGH. A further follow up of the area left behind up to half a century later was still in the pipeline when he sadly departed from the East End himself.

THE NEW EAST END is what became of that noble intention, and it is a disingenuous, disastrous exercise in ideological trickery. Influenced by the unsavoury elitism of halfwits like Theodore Dalrymple , and employing nothing which could ever be recognised as sociological method, the book creates the impression that the flight of the white descendants of the working class from the East End is caused by the influx from a part of the former empire of darker skinned Islamic people whose own family connections with the area actually extend almost as far back as those of the Hugenots. There is a huge literature on the dynamics of urban migration going back to the 1920s from which it is obvious that this prejudice is misplaced.

You can be sure that this book will sell and make a lot of money which will neither go to the present inhabitants of the area nor the children of the original subjects. It is a terrible indictment of the state of the “book industry” in the UK that a respectable publisher saw fit to put this out in its present form.

Wherever you go I will be carcass
Whatever you see will be rotting flesh
Humanity recovered glittering etiquette
Answers her crimes with Mausoleum rent

Regained your self-control
And regained your self-esteem
And blind your success inspires
And analyse, despise and scrutinise
Never knowing what you hoped for
And safe and warm but life is so silent
For the victims who have no speech
In their shapeless guilty remorse
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Your meaning, your meaning

No birds - no birds
The sky is swollen black
No birds - no birds
Holy mass of dead insect

Come and walk down memory lane
No one sees a thing but they can pretend
Life eternal scorched grass and trees
For your love nature has haemorrhaged

Regained your self-control
And regained your self-esteem
And blind your success inspires
And analyse, despise and scrutinise
Never knowing what you hoped for
And safe and warm but life is so silent
For the victims who have no speech
In their shapeless guilty remorse
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Your meaning, your meaning

No birds - no birds
The sky is swollen black
No birds - no birds
Holy mass of dead insect

I wanted to rub the human face in it's own vomit... and force it to look in the mirror.

And life can be as important as death
But so mediocre when there's no air, no light and no hope
Prejudice burns brighter when it's all we have to burn
The world lances youth's lamb-like winter, winter